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The Week In Links—May 23

By
suzyhooker
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ava
Ava Talley, trans and sex workers’ rights activist and performer in Mariko Passion’s Whorrific Cabaret

Donate before June 8th to Tits and Sass contributor Mariko Passion’s Whoriffic Cabaret at the Hollywood Fringe Festival on June 16th. Read trans and sex workers’ rights activist Ava Talley’s tribute to Mariko’s work and the upcoming festival here:

“Sex/Love workers of all persuasions will have the opportunity to showcase their talents at Whorrific Cabaret, a musical storytelling event that has been produced by Mariko Passion many times in different spaces, which aims to bring together sex and love workers, allies and clients who have talent and an opinion. This cabaret happens June 16th, 5:30pm at Three Clubs in Hollywood and is part of the Hollywood Fringe Festival: an annual, uncurated, open-access, community-derived event celebrating freedom of expression and collaboration in the performing arts community.”

AB 1576, the bill requiring condom use for all porn productions shot in CA, passed the CA appropriations committee. The concept of “forced consent” was repeatedly invoked. ‘“I don’t know what that means and how that can exist, but in what other industry would we accept forced consent as a concept?” an attorney from Mind Geek asked.’ Not to be all Inigo Montoya, but I do not think that means what they think it means.

Really tragic: Alyssa Funke, a young porn performer, killed herself after cyberbullying from ex-high school classmates about her sex work.

This Newsweek profile on Somaly Mam is a rebuttal to every hysterical trafficking narrative ever. She auditioned girls to be the faces of fictional trauma-narratives, and fabricated her own past. “‘If your goal is fundraising, you actually have an incentive to pull out the most gory story,’ Papi explains, ‘and so we get completely false realities of the world.’” Between this and the study on youth sex workers the popular trafficking narrative is taking some blows.

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I’m Katha Pollitt’s “Highly Educated” Leftist—And A Sex Trafficking Victim

By
Tara Burns
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tniconsent
If you can read this, you’re too fancy to matter. (image courtesy of The New Inquiry)

Earlier this year, The New Inquiry published this quiz, “Are You Being Sex Trafficked?” which appeared in an earlier form here on Tits and Sass. Katha Pollitt hinged part of her “Why Do So Many Leftists Want Sex Work to Be the New Normal?” essay on the imagined qualities of TNI’s writers and audience:

Of course, if you are reading the New Inquiry, chances are you’re not being sex trafficked; if you’re a sex worker, chances are you’re a grad student or a writer or maybe an activist—a highly educated woman who has other options and prefers this one. And that is where things get tricky. Because in what other area of labor would leftists look to the elite craftsman to speak for the rank and file? You might as well ask a pastry chef what it’s like to ladle out mashed potatoes in a school cafeteria. In the discourse of sex work, it seems, the subaltern does not get to speak.

The problem is not that the subaltern was not getting to speak, but that Pollitt was unable to listen because of her own ideas about how trafficking victims should present. We asked Tara, the author of the quiz, to respond.

On April 2nd I was at the Freedom Network’s Human Trafficking Conference in San Francisco speaking to a group of law enforcement and service providers about how to do outreach to people who are trafficked in to the commercial sex trade. I was there as part of a federal program designed to offer the experience and expertise of sex trafficking victims like myself with the goal of improving services to other sex trafficking victims. The other survivor presenting and I both had extensive experience as youth involved in the sex trade, as adult sex workers, and as social service providers. We spoke of our experiences with law enforcement and service providers and made recommendations to those present about how they could best provide outreach to sex trafficking victims.

At the end, the facilitator flipped through our feedback forms and laughingly told us that one person thought that our presentation hadn’t been about sex trafficking at all. Apparently there are rules for being a good victim: 1. Victims should cry 2. They should talk about horrible things done to them by criminals, but not by the police 3. They should not have opinions, and 4. If they do have opinions, they should present themselves as traumatized enough so that those opinions are easily discountable. If victims don’t behave this way, their status as victims can be called into question.

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Dogs & Dollars

By
suzyhooker
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1051

1732

Hey there!

I would love to add these to your Tits and Sass series on sex worker puppies and cash!

Love
Zahra
xx

Sex workers, submit pictures of your furballs and funds here.

Stop AB1576: Compulsory Condom Use Won’t Make Porn Performers Safer

By
Cyd Nova
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astopab1576
(Photo pf Chanel Preston by Mickey Mod)

Tomorrow the California Assembly’s Appropriations Committee will vote on AB 1576 , a bill that would mandate condoms for all penetrative sex acts in porn. It also requires porn companies to indefinitely carry medical records for each contractor they shoot, and the vague language of the bill leaves room for Cal-OSHA to also mandate barriers, including protective eyewear and gloves, as well as disposable plastic covering for sets, so that performers can enjoy fucking on a Saran Wrap-covered couch.

This legislation presents itself as advocacy for sex workers’ healthcare, despite a majority of adult entertainment workers opposing it loudly and clearly. The bill’s sponsor, representative (and former minister) Isadore Hall and major supporters the AIDS Healthcare Foundation have refused to take the voices of the community into account, instead collaborating with such organizations as Pink Cross, a Christian ex-porn performer nonprofit.

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Who Makes Your Money: WePay and Eden Alexander

By
Bubbles
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eden01Eden Alexander’s current fundraiser is live here.

This weekend, a Twitterstorm erupted when payment processor WePay shut down a medical fundraiser for porn performer Eden Alexander. Alexander found herself in an unforgiving position after the complications she experienced from an allergic reaction to a prescription drug were misdiagnosed when a doctor assumed that since she was in the sex industry, her symptoms were those of drug use. The delay of proper care meant her condition worsened, and she couldn’t work. Like other self-employed Americans, Alexander doesn’t have sick days, and friends who were helping care for her set up a fundraising page on GiveForward to raise money for her.

GiveForward is a WePay-powered site where people can set up medical fundraisers. WePay came across tweets from Alexander’s friends offering adult materials in exchange for donations to Alexander’s fundraiser (yes, a payment processor was monitoring a user’s social media). They decided that this qualified as accepting payments for prohibited pornographic materials and shut down the fundraiser. Kitty Stryker, one of Alexander’s friends who set up the initial fundraiser, wrote about it here.

And then they experienced the wrath of Sex Worker Twitter and that of some allies with large follower bases. Coverage of the incident showed up on Gawker and The Rumpus, in blog posts by feminists and sociologists. Thanks to Molly Crabapple’s strong influence across Geek Twitter, Patton Oswalt tweeted about it. By Saturday afternoon, WePay had issued an official statement about the Alexander fundraiser, giving as their reason the offering of adult materials as rewards, and offering to help her restart her campaign. They did not mention if they would shut it down again if, say, a friend of Alexander’s, maybe another adult performer, offered a video or a photograph to someone who donated. This is something out of the control of a person who starts a fundraiser, although the founder of WePay said just the fact that Alexander retweeted those unasked-for incentives implicated her in a hypothetical exchange of funds for porn.

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